Red carnation tattoo with a green stem and leaves on the side of a person's ribs, in a painterly botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red carnation on the side ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A red carnation with a green stem and two leaves is tattooed on the side of a torso, just above the waistband of dark jeans. The petals are shaded in deep reds with darker purple tones and fine stippled texture, while loose red splatters surround the bloom. The green stem and leaves are rendered in simpler, lighter strokes, and the image is framed tightly on the torso.

Botanical Ribs Carnation Flower Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the coal bucket. My grandfather grew carnations, and not the shop sort wrapped in cellophane on a Friday. He grew show carnations in a yard off Ashgrove Row, forty yards of soot-black brick, and he tended them the way the chapel women tended their hymns, every day and without complaint.

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The trouble was the pit. Every shift the air came up the shaft grey with dust, and it settled on everything: the step, the washing, the lace at the windows. Nothing red came through that grey unless you fought for it. So he sieved the banking-fire ash through an old flour sack, fed the beds with it, and talked to the plants the way other men talked to their whippets. Nobody thought much of it until the Easter show at the Miners' Institute, where a bloom of his, a crimson so deep it went purple at the heart, took the cup from Harry Scoular. Harry had won it eleven years running and never once looked pleased about it.

Harry came round that night with his cap in both hands. He did not ask how it was done. He asked whether there was one left, and my grandfather cut the best from its stem and wrapped the wet end in a twist of newspaper. Harry carried it home through the rain as if it might break.

Next morning Harry's wife set it in a jar on the sill. By dinnertime a single petal had dropped onto the wood, a red splash on the grey, and she would not let anyone sweep it away. That's what the yard was for, you see. Not the cup. The one bright thing the dust couldn't get the better of.